On the Year of Prayer

Theme: Through the Desert

God Leads us to Freedom
What is Lent?
On the Year of Prayer

Theme: Through the Desert

God Leads us to Freedom
 Pope Francis asks for
2024 to be a year of
prayer, as preparation
for the Jubilee Year in
2025 – Pilgrims of Hope.
During this year, we are invited
to promote individual prayer
and community prayer within
ourselves and our communities.
This Lent, we open our hearts
and our parishes to be servants
of the Suffering Servant, Jesus,
who poured out his life for us.
Lent is when our heavenly Father
invites us to return to him with all
our heart and is an opportunity to
seek healing and to know the
transforming mercy of God. We
walk these forty Lent days with
Jesus on a pilgrimage of grace and
hope and look to Him for healing
and new direction.
Our sharing in Jesus’ way of the
cross is walked in weakness and
need, and paced by the patient
love He shows us on the way. As
you walk the path ahead, lean
on these resources for support,
guidance and inspiration
Worry less about the pace you set
for yourself and be open to the
stirrings of the Holy Spirit in the
silence this holy season gives to our
suffering and search for healing.
We walk together the way of the
cross as pilgrims of hope, open to
the prayer the Holy Spirit stirs in us.
MESSAGE OF
HIS HOLINESS
POPE FRANCIS
FOR LENT
2024

Through the
Desert God
Leads us to
Freedom
It is time to act, and in Lent, to act also
means to pause. To pause in prayer, in
order to receive the word of God, to
pause like the Samaritan in the presence
of a wounded brother or sister. Love of
God and love of neighbor are one love.
Not to have other gods is to pause in the
presence of God beside the flesh of our
neighbor. – Pope Francis
The Church’s synodal form, which in
these years we are rediscovering and
cultivating, suggests that Lent is also a
time of communitarian decisions, of
decisions, small and large, that are
countercurrent. Decisions capable of
altering the daily lives of individuals and
entire neighborhoods, such as the ways
we acquire goods, care for creation, and
strive to include those who go unseen or
are looked down upon. – Pope Francis
I invite every Christian community to do
just this: to offer its members moments set
aside to rethink their lifestyles, times to
examine their presence in society and the
contribution they make to its betterment.
Woe to us if our Christian penance were to
resemble the kind of penance that so
dismayed Jesus. To us too, he says:
“Whenever you fast, do not look dismal,
like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their
faces so as to show others that they are
fasting” (Mt 6:16). – Pope Francis
On the Year of Prayer

Theme: Through the Desert

God Leads us to Freedom